Yvonne Busch, who was a touring musician during her early teenage years but returned to New Orleans and became an influential music teacher in the public school system, died Friday at a relative’s home in Westwego. She was 84. Many of her music students in New Orleans schools would […]

Born in New Orleans in 1929 and raised in the historic Treme section of the city, Ms Yvonne Busch who mastered several brass instruments and the woodwinds, became a touring professional by the age of 12, crisscrossing the United States as a member of the critically acclaimed “International Sweethearts of Rhythm” and the “Swinging Rays of Rhythm” two all-female bands sponsored by the Piney Woods Country Life School, an historic African-American boarding school located in Piney Woods, Mississippi.

Ms. Busch provided the foundation for scores of New Orleans finest musicians, who excelled in careers in jazz, R&B and gospel, by teaching them the rudiments of music.

The Life Story of Ms Yvonne Busch documentary has won international recognition by winning the AVA Platinum Award, Hermes Gold Award and a Bronze Telly Award.

To View On Demand the documentary for private use only click link below:

This is another story about a lost african-american community called Fazendeville near the Chalmette Battlefield.

While much deserved attention this week has gone to the 200th anniversary of the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of two less-remembered losses near the Chalmette battlefield. They were vestiges of opposite ends of antebellum Creole society, one a tiny hamlet of poor black families, the other an opulent plantation mansion.

Both survived a century after the Civil War, and both were obliterated in 1965.

The hamlet developed out of a rice field owned by Pierre Fazende, a free man of color who appears to have inherited a portion of the Chalmette plantation on which the Battle of New Orleans was fought. In 1856, his son subdivided the elongated parcel, positioned roughly parallel to the former American firing line, and sold the 33 lots of “Fazendeville” to other free people of color, and after the Civil War, emancipated slaves.

As the Civil War was winding down 150 years ago, Union leaders gathered a group of black ministers in Savannah, Ga. The goal was to help the thousands of newly freed slaves.

From that meeting came Gen. William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order 15. It set aside land along the Southeast coast so that “each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground.”

That plan later became known by a signature phrase: “40 acres and a mule.”

After wrapping up his famous march, Sherman spent weeks in Savannah, staying in an ornate Gothic revival mansion called the Green-Meldrim House. That’s where he and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton held their meeting with local black leaders.

The Green-Meldrim House in Savannah, Ga., is where Gen. William T. Sherman held meetings with local black leaders, creating the plan later known as “40 acres and a mule.”Sarah McCammon/NPRhide caption